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How to fit and wire up a set of replacement stainless stalks

If you have used the donor parts for the switch gear, you will end up with something from Ford, made of plastic and not quite in keeping with the Cobra interior. A nice way to sort this area out is with some nice stainless steel stalks. There are various options for this, you could make your own, though you'll need some specialist tools, time and skill, or you can buy a set and fit them yourself. Here's how they look when fitted:

Here is some info on how to make your own: Craigs DIY stalk article.
One supplier is DaxBenelux, this company can sell some nice stainless stalks for around £25 a set, the photo below shows such a set.

As you can see the stalks are nice and slimline and come with a set of small grommets which could be used to cover the hole you drill for them to fit into….or…

How to fit:

Its makes life easy if you remove the steering column from the car, do this by first releasing the clamp forming part of the top uninversal joint in the engine bay, then in the remove the plastic cowling around the steering column, disconnect the electrical connectors and then remove the main clamp, the entire column with the steering wheel attached should now pull out.

Wiring

The front wiper is controlled via a push button on the end of the wiper stalk, the stalks shown above do not have such a push fit. You could mount a separate switch on the dash for this, but this is a lot of messing around and not very tidy. A nice (and easy) alternative to this is to make use of the redundant rear wash switch in the ford column. In the original Ford, pulling the stalk back one click turns on the rear wipers, not used in Sumo, pulling is again is a sprung loaded switch (momentary) for the rear wash, again not used. To convert the front wash wipe from the end of the stalk to use this switch takes all of 1 minute.
Once you have taken the connectors off, you can see numbers against each pin, some can be ignored as they are for the wipers, the ones we're interested in are:

53-c - ford and Sumo output to front washer pump.

W - Ford output to rear washer pump, not used in Sumo as standard.

So to get the desired switching, all you need to do is move the wire that's on 53-c onto the W pin, you can easily test this using a multimeter and reading (resistance ;)) between pins 54 and 53-c, and between 54 and W when using the switches. To change these round you don't even need a soldering iron to do this:

You should find that pin W is unused, so, using a small screwdriver, gently open up the locking flap on the connector block that pushes into this set of pins, then if there is still an old connector inside the block for Pin W, remove and discard this. Then pull the wire out that connects to pin 53-c and push it into the W pin hole. The wire on W was probably black/yellow, the wire on pin 53-c was black.

The photo above shows the locking locking flap levered up and the black wire on Pin 53-c being pulled out.

To summarise, the black ford wire is now on Pin W and connects to the light green on the Pilgrim loom.

Fitting.

As with all these jobs there are many ways to do this, I chose to fit the stalks using a longish stub of the existing stalk and fit a cover to finish it off. The stub of the old stalk really adds strength to the new stalks and makes for a very solid feeling fit.

The first stage it to cut the old stalks off, this is fairly simple, but, before you do, take the back off the wiper arm and carefully remove the 3 wires. One thing to note here, when you remove these 3 wires you loose the internal share of earths between the lights and the wiper switch gear, to prevent this causing problems you need to ensure you have earth wires connected to BOTH of the tabs on top of the connector blocks, these are the metal tabs sticking out labelled 55 and 31. If you don't something will stop working, possibly the headlights or the lights will go out when you use the washer.

The picture below shows the length of stalk left.

The next step is to drill a hole in the end to match the size of your stalks, the hole should be as tighter fit as possible, you need to make sure the angle of the hole is such that the stalk is in the right place, this does allow you to move the headlight stalk forward slightly to solve the Sumo problem if it rubbing on the dash.

Next, the stub needs to be ground down to match whatever you are going to cover it with, this was done with a Dremel using a metal grinding bit.

The covers in this example are made from the plastic tips of marker pens from the bins at work painted black, here's the make and model of the pens, the ends were cut off and ground nice and flat, then the hole carefully drilled out to match the size of the stalks.

Next the stalks are bonded into the holes using West System Epoxy. DONT FORGET TO PUT THE COVERS ON!!!!

After this has set the stalks already feel solid as a rock, but to further ensure they never fall off, the sub is bound with Fibreglass thread (unpicked from a sheet of woven rovings), this is then soaked in resin and the cover is filled with resin and pushed over.

After its all set it looks like this and its certainly not going to fall off.